Public schools in the old style were responsible for the gradual undermining and destruction of the most prosperous and powerful society in history.
The perceptual inversion made by apologists for the good old days results from imagining the relationship between public education and modernity as a still photograph, rather than observing the historical trajectory of the relationship in motion.
The mechanisms of liberty, free markets, individualism, and self-reliance were set in motion centuries before public education was generally available, let alone universal and compulsory.
The generations that produced the ideas and art which gave modern liberty its mind and character, as well as the generations that produced the statesmen and warriors who brought modernity’s promise to practical realization, were generations without public education.
The accumulated spiritual and economic momentum of liberty was able to withstand the first frictions of progressive authoritarianism, allowing civilization and its economies to grow even while the tyrannical urge was beginning its ugly lurch into modern life.
But nowhere was this progressive infection more destructive, and more brilliantly conceived, than in government schools, which can nip in the bud the natural impulse to learn and excel, and which were explicitly intended from early on to produce competent but submissive workers for the benefit of the ruling class.
The subsequent broadening of the progressive schools’ agenda to include the deliberate undermining of the family, the short-circuiting of Eros in favor of permanent puberty, and socialist revisionism regarding the Western intellectual and historical heritage, was not a radical shift in education policy, but a “natural” devolution made possible by the success of earlier stages of corruption. (This descent also defines the devolution of the teaching profession itself.)
The Jesuits said, “give me the child for seven years, and I will give you the man.”
Lenin boasted that he needed only the first four years to mold a child to the unshakable form that communism required. It is no accident that John Dewey was primarily focused on early childhood education as early as the 1880s.
Or that Bill Ayers is today. Yes, public education continues to deteriorate. But that is the point: the deterioration is a continuation of something begun generations ago.
None of us who have been through any version of public schooling should fool ourselves about what this means, including and especially for our own souls.
This is no time for foolish pride; it is time for righteous anger, and the will to put a stop to more than a century of forced intellectual and moral decline.
Universal public education is modernity’s monster, the fatal mistake of a prosperous civilization imagining that it can take over where freed human nature left off, and even outdo freedom and nature, by mass producing, through government micromanagement, the kind of men who make liberty and civil society possible.
This description of public education’s foundations is the generous version, which I offer only as a concession to those who object to my arguments against this monster by noting that even some good men have favored state control of childhood education.
It is true: some good men have favored this. It is also true that the best and most nobly motivated of these men—from Aristotle to James Madison—were not publicly educated themselves, and never lived in a community in which state-controlled education was the norm.
We cannot know, but may guess, how their views on the subject might be different were they among us today, witnessing the practical reality of a civilization in ruins, thanks in large measure to the multi-generational effects of compulsory government-regulated schooling on a society’s practical intelligence, moral character, and the habits of mind that make liberal education in the proper sense possible.
The blind spot of these men of exalted spirit, such as Aristotle and Madison, is their noble-minded presumption that in a good and just society, good and just motives will prevail.
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In sum, state control of education—as of most things—is an invitation to ignoble men to insinuate themselves and their immoral motives into the system, seeking their own perceived advantage at the expense of fellow men who fall under the jurisdiction of their legislative influence.
And since, in this case, it is the soul of the future—the children—into which evil may be insinuated, it would seem that education, far from being an exception to the rule of limited government, ought to be an especially emphatic marker of the proper limits of legitimate government involvement in men’s affairs.
The risk is too great. The proof of this is in the poison pudding of today’s public schools, not merely in one or two nations, but worldwide.
Indeed, the universality of compulsory government schooling, considered a radical outrage when Carl Marx proposed it just a century and a half ago, is itself evidence of the way corruption breeds further corruption.
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Leave your ego to one side, for the sake of mankind’s future.
If you were publicly educated, your soul’s growth was stunted to a significant degree, at the very least through the emotional bruising engendered by your spiritual resistance.
Be not proud. Be angry. And resolve to end this authoritarian abomination before it ends us.
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Top o’ the morning!